What Democrats Should Be Talking About at the DNC

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — I was only here for about eight hours before I found the coolest place at this convention. It's an air-conditioned tent being run by the Democratic delegation from Alabama in back of an old brick church about halfway down Brevard Street between the convention center and the arena. On Sunday, they ran a gospel brunch there, and the entertainment was an a cappella group from Huntsville called Committed. The centerpiece of their show is a gorgeous version of "The Battle Cry of Freedom," the song by George F. Root behind which the Union armies marched and Abraham Lincoln was re-elected in 1864.

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

And although they may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah.

Down with the traitor, up with the star;

While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

The version they sang was not martial. It was slow and reverent. It was not the song you sang while marching toward Sharpsburg, or Gettysburg, or Appomattox, a song you sang to steel yourselves against the horrors you knew were coming. It was a song you sang on the long walk home at the end of it all, to Wisconsin or Minnesota, New Hampshire or Vermont, the April blossoms bursting around you while the dark memories of those same horrors erupted unbidden in your mind at night, and you sang it this way, as a hymn to memory, to steel yourself against an even harder battle while the firelight died out. That is the way they sang it, these six young African American men, history as resonant in them as the notes of their voices, and it was far too early to start weeping at this convention, but I did. If the Democratic Party had any courage, any daring at all left in its soul, they would sing this from the stage, in primetime, preferably immediately before Barack Obama accepts the nomination of his party again on Thursday night, and the Democratic Party would not care a whit who it offended and why it offended them. If the party is going to choose to convene here, in a non-union city in a right-to-work state, it should at least acknowledge strongly and publicly that the song lives because the issues that caused it to be written in the first place still live in modern dress.

There is no question in my mind anymore that the Republican Party has reconfigured itself as a Confederate party. Not because it is so largely white, though it is. Not because it is largely Southern, though it is that, too. And not because it fights so hard for vestigial accoutrements like the Confederate battle flag. The Republican Party is a Confederate party, I think, because that is its view of what the government of the United States should be. It is written quite clearly in the party's platform that the Republicans adopted last week in Tampa: "The Republican party... stands for the rights of individuals, families, faith communities. institutions — and of the States which are their instruments of self-government."

Or, as John C. Calhoun put it, years earlier: "The error is in the assumption that the General Government is a party to the constitutional compact. The States ... formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities."

(Writing from his retirement in Virginia, no less an authority than James Madison called bullshit on Calhoun. "The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater fight to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it.")

We are not a union of states. That argument lost in Philadelphia in 1789. The Constitution is a covenant between We, the People, not We, the States. The national government is every bit the "instrument of our self-government" as any state is. Nevertheless, the Republican Party has gone full Tenther. Now a lot of it is couched in arguments against the tyranny of EPA regulations and the jackboots of the individual health-care mandate, but there is no question that the driving force of this theory of government is resistance to full African-American citizenship just the way it was in 1860, in 1879, in 1957, and in 1965. And the most obvious manifestation of that resistance today is the staggering welter of voter-suppression laws that have emerged in the years since the president was elected. Almost all of them are being defended on Tenther grounds; Texas is directly challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

(And, just in case anybody missed the point, in the same passage of its platform quoted above, the Republican Party condemned "the current Administration's assaults on State governments in matters ranging from voter ID laws to immigration." The "assault" in question involves the Department of Justice's entirely legal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a law freely passed in constitutional fashion by a free Congress as the representatives of the people in 1965. This is pure Tenther gibberish, and the people who wrote the Republican platform would have flunked civics back when we still taught it.)

Nobody who was around in those days is in any way fooled. Living through the civil-rights movement means you learned the key to every code word, and you learned to see through sheep's clothing no matter how thick the wool. On Monday, at a caucus of African-American delegates, voter suppression was just about the only topic that got everybody riled up. Many of these people were the ones who got locked up and beaten, or their children, or, now, their grandchildren. They know that the federal government was the "instrument of their self-government" because, in those bloody days, they didn't have another one.

In 1963, C. Virginia Fields was a 17-year-old student in Birmingham. "I was one of the foot-soldiers in 1963," she told me. "I was seventeen. I went to jail for five days with Dr. King. It wasn't a sense of fear for me. Growing up in Birmingham, in segregated conditions, you saw racism up close and personal. Our parents were denied so many opportunities, so that when opportunity came for me, under leadership of my pastor, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, when Dr. King came, I was ready. There was not a sense of fear. There was a sense of readiness.

"I am not surprised," Fields went on. "When those who want to make change can't do it this way, they never give up. They continue until they get something that seems a little more palatable, and seems to be less offensive. So I am not surprised. I learned many years ago growing up that the devil is always busy. The devil never stops. These people never stopped."

Not long after Fields went to jail, Henry Marsh, a lawyer in Richmond — and, eventually, the first African-American mayor of that city — went to court. He proved that a registrar of voters in Petersburg was using a literacy-test scam to keep African Americans from voting. In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was being debated, Virginia argued that it shouldn't be covered under Section V of that act, which required that, because of their proven history of discrimination, states so covered were required to submit any change in their election laws to the Department of Justice. The states-rights people howled. (They still do. It's Section V that Texas wants to use to bring down the whole act.) Virginia claimed it was being unfairly used. Henry Marsh got the material with which he'd won his case to Senator Edward Kennedy. Virginia got put under Section V.

"I have to admit," Marsh said. "I am surprised at the intensity with which they're resisting, but I've been involved for a long time. I always expect to have to win this fight over and over again."

The Republicans get positively giddy quoting Ronald Reagan to the effect that, "Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction," as though this were in some way profound. People like Virginia Fields and Henry Marsh know that freedom is never more than a couple of seconds from extinction because, unlike Reagan and the people who so glibly quote him, their freedoms have real enemies, and those enemies have not changed. Every damn speaker from that podium should be as harsh and unyielding on voting rights as all those Republicans were about what the president did with health care. Nikki Haley should be made a pincushion for arguing in favor of the voter-suppression laws in her state. The attempt to undo African-American citizenship is the one battle from that war that has gone on and on and on, and that's why those kids should sing that song from the podium, in prime time, because, if the Democratic Party doesn't stand in opposition to the Confederate view of the United States that prevails in the other party, if it lets people like Virginia Fields and Henry Marsh down, then there isn't enough of it left to care about at all.

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